Do you ever feel that when you look at the sky, something is up there looking back at you?

Yeah.

Here’s looking at you, kid.

This cosmic eye is an illusion. I mean, duh, it’s not an eye. But it’s not even really shaped like one! The shape itself isn’t real.

The "pupil" of the eye is actually a galaxy about 2.2 billion light years from Earth. That’s a fair bit! But it happens to sit almost directly between us and a much more more distant galaxy — one that is 11 billion light years away. As the light from the background galaxy passes by the nearer one, the gravity of the nearer one bends the path of that light, twisting it in what’s called a gravitational lens.

Arcs are common results of lensing. That’s what you’re seeing here; the distant galaxy image split in two, arcs surrounding the spherical galaxy between them. An eye!

So that’s cool all by its lonesome. But of course there’s more.

A gravitational lens does more than distort the background galaxy image. it also magnifies it and makes it brighter. That means it’s easier to see, and easier to study. Usually, galaxies 11 frakkin’ billion light years away are too dinky to see well, but this one is literally laid out for us to see. By studying it, astronomers have actually been able to detect rotation (not by seeing it move — that would take millions of years — but by taking spectra and measuring the Doppler shift of the material in the galaxy. The rotation indicates that what we’re seeing here is a disk galaxy, young, but relatively normal, on its way to becoming a spiral galaxy much like our own!

It’s like a picture of a toddler, a galaxy growing up. It’s easily the best study of a distant galaxy ever made. And it’s pushed pretty hard on the technology — Hubble discovered the lens (and took the image above), and it took the 10-meter Keck telescope in Hawaii to observe the spectra in detail. But soon, much larger telescopes currently being planned will find more objects like this, and instead of this being a one-off object, we’ll be able to build up a catalog of them. And when that happens, our own eyes will be able to stretch back in time and distance even better.

Oh, one more thing: if that eye looks familiar to people of a certain age, well, you’re not alone. The Alan Parsons Project predicted this image back in June of 1982! Don’t believe me? Look at the name of the album: "Eye in the Sky"!

I am the eye in the sky
Looking at you
I can read your mind
I am the maker of rules
Dealing with fools
I can cheat you blind
And I don’t need to see any more
To know that
I can read your mind, I can read your mind

Hi Phil (I hope you don’t mind me calling you that way, otherwise you could post a call-me-a-doctor FAQ),

My wife just pointed me at pretty amazing thing. She said a man planted trees like 40 years ago and then looked after them to see them become what are they now… Well, if you come close still staying at Earth’s surface, they could look like trees. But when you look from up there…

It turns out that that “overhead projector” John McCain claimed Barack Obama tried to get a $3 million earmark for was actually money to rebuild Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, the oldest planetarium in the United States.

McCain’s “overhead projector” is the apparatus that runs the planetarium, which is a bit like calling the Palomar Observatory a new set of glasses.

Yet Another Beautiful Picture! As an Alan Parsons Project fan, I appreciated the reference, but – now I’m going to have that tune running through my head all day, too. At least it’s one I can enjoy over and over and over. . .

Phil, 1982 and 2K BC are unhip? Then what do you call 2.2 and 11 billion years old?! I’m just askin’. . . – g^2

P.S. Yes, I had the LP, and so did my wife.

P.P.S. If you don’t know what an LP is, go look it up Hint: the letters stand for Long Playing and has something to do with 33rpm vinyl.

The (a)symmetry does not only depend on the mass distribution, the actual position of the background galaxy behind the lensing galaxy is at least as important as the mass distribution. If the background galaxy is perfectly in line with the lensing galaxy then you get an “Einstein Ring” (mentioned above). If it’s a bit out of the line the ring gets distorted and you can get that “eye”, but the position is really crucial – a few arcseconds do matter! (Of course the mass distribution effects the picture you get, but I think it’s more about the position in this case.)

I am a big fan of Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson. They did albums together as the Alan Parsons Project, then split up so Woolfson could go into musicals. Parsons kept going, but dropped “Project” in deference to his buddy’s departure.

Actually, if you like Alan Parsons, you should check out “Time Machine”, a recent album he did. It’s one of his better concept albums, and includes some actual astronomy on the second track as it describes how when we see distant objects, we are actually seeing them as they were many, many years ago. It’s also got a picture of the TARDIS on the cover, which is cool. 😉 (And the song “Out Of The Blue” really fits the Doctor well.)

No, the “Alan Parson’s Project” was Dr. Evil’s plan to blow up the planet by drilling to it’s core. Or was it the one with the “laser”?

That would be the “laser”. “Time Machine” coincidentally came out the same year as the second Austin Powers movies, and Alan Parsons was tickled pink by the joke. In response he did a couple of remixes of “Time Machine” (the instrumental title track of the album) featuring sound clips from the movie. It’s pretty good; they were released as a four-track “single” with four different cuts of “Time Machine”.

Another Alan Parsons album that might be appreciated by folks here is “On Air”, released in the mid-90s. It’s about aerospace, and includes a couple of very nice spaceflight songs: “Apollo” and “Welcome to the Mission”. And for the sci-fi geeks here, their second album, released way back in 1977, was “I Robot”, inspired by the Isaac Asimov anthology of the same name. And for the really serious science fiction geeks, who like *old* sci-fi, there’s always their original album: “Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Edgar Allen Poe”, featuring the voice of Orson Welles in a couple of songs. They’ve also got some nice stuff for skeptics. Their third album, “Pyramid”, contains “Pyramania,” which is a response to the pyramid silliness of the late 70s.

I’ve consulted all the sages I could find in the Yellow Pages but there aren’t many of them
And the Mayan panoramas on my pyramid pajamas haven’t helped my little problem….

Calli Arcale: You didn’t mention the “Turn of a friendly card” album, probably because it isn’t science fiction related. However it does have what I consider to be one of the finest songs ever written: “Time”. (Not to be confused with the Pink Floyd song of the same name.)

Play that song while you contemplate the vast span of time between that galaxy and us. Awesome!

The most impressive fact here to me is that the abstract of the respective paper doesn’t even mention the gravitational lensing involved – this phenomenon, first seen a mere 29 years ago, has already become a perfectly normal tool for looong-distance astronomy.

“Turn of a Friendly Card” is probably the best concept album from the “Project” years. I tend to waver between that and “On Air” as to which is the best overall Alan Parsons album — depends on the mood I’m in, basically. 😉

The main reason I didn’t mention it, though, was because I was realizing that I was getting on an Alan Parsons kick and would probably wind up mentioning every single album if I didn’t stop myself somewhere. 😉

Other good tracks, in no particular order, list not inclusive:
“Games People Play” from “Turn of a Friendly Card”
“You Don’t Believe”, from “Ammonia Avenue”
“Children of the Moon” from “Eye in the Sky” (another good one for skeptics)
“Stereotomy” from “Stereotomy”
“La Sagrada Familia” from “Gaudi” (great look at the endless cycle of war, especially religious wars)
“The Raven” from “Tales of Mystery and Imagination” (I love that poem)
“We Play the Game” from “A Valid Path” (the only song in which Alan Parsons himself is the lead vocalist — he’s got a very good voice, which you’ll recognize because he did backing vocals a lot)
“Vulture Culture” from “Vulture Culture” (one of the weaker albums, IMHO, but I like this song)
“Mr Time” from “Try Anything Once” (a rare instance of a female lead vocalist)
“Brother Up In Heaven” from “On Air” (brings tears to my eyes every time; became an unofficial anthem for Columbine victims, but was written about a guy who died in a friendly fire incident)

Oh, and if you feel “Turn of a Friendly Card” got short shrift from me, that’s probably ironic, since I used as part of the background color for a crossover fanfic that I wrote, called The Resurrection of Evil. (Yeah, it’s a melodramatic title, but it’s a Doctor Who story. :-P) If you want to see the album played up a bit, and if you don’t mind Dr Who/Highlander crossover fanfiction, you might want to check it out. (Warning: first chapter contains serious factual errors. I screwed up some history. I have since learned to *research* first.)

This “gravitational lense” works both ways, right?
So as I’m writing this, some bug-eyed alien 11 billion miles away could be putting a similar image of the Milky Way as its desktop background?
I know it doesn’t work out quite that way because the “lense” galaxy is much closer to here than there, but it’s a fun idea! It gets better if you consider that it might be wondering what its galaxy looks like from our perspective, or perhaps that it could be posting some silly comments about it on its version of the 1nt4rw3b…

But yea, my actual question is whether this would work both ways if the distances were equal, or if relativity would come into effect – 11 billion years ago, our galaxy would be someplace else so perhaps we’d be outside of the lensing effect?